A Letter To Amira Poem by Antonio Giorgio

It's 5am here and you are drunk on white Russian's asking me if I am broken?
Now's way too early for painful memories and sweet nostalgia,
Too early to think of lost friends and broken hearts.
When I was a child I used to hold my sister in my arms, protecting her from the psychological abuse of having two warring parents use our home as an epic battleground.
The first taste I had of loss was when my grandfather Antonis had died.
My parents broke his heart when they divorced and he spent the following year drinking bottles of whisky until his liver was scarred beyond recognition.
At seventeen I was so full of insecurities and bad memories I contemplated suicide so many times I'm surprised I ever reached eighteen.
I remember listening to insomnia when I really had insomnia when my friend fell from the rooftops to his death,
Or the sadness of Maria the angelic looking school teacher that didn't eat for six months and then discovered she had stomach cancer,
Or knowing that I once had a brother who shared my name and died before I was born my ex would swear that she spoke to him in her dreams,
Why would I even want to venture the recesses of my soul to bring these scars back up to the liquid surface of my mind?
Why should I show you that all human beings are vulnerable you must know this?
I remember the faces of all the girls that touched my heart there laughter and tears,
Each one still has a piece of my heart and I a piece of there's
Some merely travel with us in our memories others haunt us in our dreams.
What of my innocent Athena the victim of two parents who no longer loved one another.
Walking out on her that day the trauma of leaving makes all the other things pale in comparison.
We are estranged now if she were to see me her soft cotton brain would not even recall how I used to hold her on my belly and stroke her hair.
Then there was Athena my daughter's aunty who as a diabetic got gangrene in her leg and suffered the indignity of learning about her husband's infidelity,
The doctors amputated her limb and she screamed at night for morphine...I will not even tell you how this story ends because it is too grueling,

So what then Amira do you wish to bare your soul to me...I will not ask that of you because I know that you too are damaged,
It was the dark painful photograph of you and your eloquence that inspired me to contact you,
Perhaps you were a kindred soul reaching out to me,
Everything is connected in some strange way-Every action leads us down a path way that has a small surprise,
But you are the greatest surprise of all...a big booming explosive beautiful surprise!